Choke

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AMY BIANCOLLI, Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Published 5:30 am, Friday, September 26, 2008

Photo: JESSICA MIGLIO, FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

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2008: Sam Rockwell, right, plays Victor, a sex addict with possibly divine parentage in Choke, based on a novel with the same name written by Chuck Palahniuk. During the day Victor works with Denny, played by Brad William Henke, right, as a tour guide. less

2008: Sam Rockwell, right, plays Victor, a sex addict with possibly divine parentage in Choke, based on a novel with the same name written by Chuck Palahniuk. During the day Victor works with Denny, played by ... more

Photo: JESSICA MIGLIO, FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

Choke

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Choke makes me wish I could drop-kick the four-star-rating system right out the window.

It is by no means a great film. It is by no means a bad one. Aspects of it moved me, intrigued me or made me laugh out loud; other aspects of it scraped my nails sadistically over a blackboard. It is often uneven, sometimes ill-judged and yet topped with a sharp, gutsy performance that seduced me into caring. It's cynical in its portrayal of sex, credulous in its portrayal of love and by turns romantic, graphic, inspirational, amusing, disgusting, sentimental, acerbic, spiritual and flip.

Choke marks the directorial debut of Clark Gregg, until now a journeyman character actor whose agreeable, sad-eyed mug has been common enough on TV (The New Adventures of Old Christine) and film (Iron Man). He's got one of those "oh, that guy" faces you'd mistake for your accountant's if you saw him on the street.

Pardon the unfair physiognomic stereotyping, but he is not the sort of fellow one expects to make a film about a sex-addicted scam artist who hacks food down his windpipe as a ploy for love and money. Gregg based his screenplay on the 2001 novel of the same name — the first Chuck Palahniuk work to hit the screen since Fight Club in 1999. No bare-knuckle violence or schizoid narrator this time: just a Colonial village tour guide with mommy problems.

Capping the list is Mommy herself. When Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) visits his mother (Anjelica Huston) in the nursing home, she has no idea who he is. To help her along, he assumes the names of assorted old lawyers (Fred, Artie, etc.) and plies her with cannelloni. In between times, he boinks the staff.

Outside these hospital visits, Victor splits his life three ways: working alongside pal Denny (Brad William Henke) and stiff Charlie (Gregg) as buckle-shoed Colonial re-enactors; "attending" 12-step meetings for his sex addiction, at least until he slips out for a quickie; and eating, or rather choking, in restaurants, where his dramatic near-asphyxiations attract Samaritans with kind hearts and deep pockets. Once the Heimlich maneuver has done its work, and Victor has cuddled, gasping, in his saviors' arms, he hits them up for money.

"You can't fool people into lovin' you," says Denny. But can't he? And doesn't everyone? Choke asks and tries to answer this question, looping back to scenes from Victor's erratic childhood. Mom was a con artist, and crazy to boot, schooling him in the art of paranoia while on the lam from who-knows-what. Every now and then, she popped out of thin air to kidnap him from his latest foster parents; every now and then, he objected.

No wonder he's at a loss when he meets a gal he really likes, an airy physician (Kelly Macdonald) at Mom's facility. And when he learns the truth of his paternity (Daddy wasn't a Norwegian traveling salesman with Tourette's?), he spins into a psychosexual identity crisis.

For a few years now, Rockwell has been my favorite oddball leading man — wry, damaged and plush-toy scruffy, at his best in asymmetrical art-house roles.

He's all of those things as Victor, a wily bundle of contradictions: the resentful son who dotes on his mother, the recovering sex fiend who can't get it up. (Spot Joel Grey as a fellow 12-stepper.) Choke's supporting performances run from rocky (Huston's) to flat (Macdonald's), but Rockwell's is a banner piece of charming Freudian hooey.

Choke copes less successfully with its own contradictions, lurching from black comedy and graphic humping to bouts of emotional truth-telling set to drippy music. I like a movie that I can't pin down — and I like one, I'll admit it, that offers love as a route to recovery. But Gregg's unstable direction mutes the humor and confuses the schmaltz, yielding a tonally discombobulated film. And a thoroughly discombobulated critic.